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Monday, 13 May 2013

White guys in suits: capitalism, costume and violence in the Wild West

In the 1990s,
Western movies like Dances with Wolves
(1990), Unforgiven (1992) and Wyatt Earp (1994) self-consciously
challenged the mythology of the American frontier. The ‘conquest’ of native
peoples was redefined as genocide, and heroic gunfighters were exposed as shady
characters. This desire for rawness and honesty was reflected in their visual
style. The pristine candy colours and gingham bonnets of 1950s movies, with
lawmen dressed like TV Country-and-Western singers, gave way to murky, stained,
sepia-brown costumes based on authentic nineteenth-century photographs.

Set in an Arizona
mining town in 1881-82, Tombstone (1993)
retold the story of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the so-called gunfight at the
OK Corral. Tombstone did not attempt to rewrite
history or expose legendary lawman Earp as a brutal killer. Instead, what
really set Tombstone apart were its costumes.

Michael F. Blake’s Hollywood and
the OK Corral (2007) explains how the film developed its unique look –
almost by accident. In the 1980s-90s, many filmmakers were hiring costumes manufactured
to depict a generic, ahistoric Wild West, not always caring about developments
in fashion and technology across the nineteenth century: accuracy was less
important than a vague old-timey feel and, in the 1990s, this meant ‘authentically’
grimy brown rags. However, with so many Westerns being made at once, there were
not enough brown rags to go around. When designer Joseph Porro visited the
Hollywood costume stores to clothe the cast of Tombstone,
the cupboard was bare.

Tombstone’s costumes had to be made from
scratch. Relying now on his own research, Porro discovered that sepia
photographs are not entirely reliable, and that the Wild West was not actually brown. He and screenwriter Kevin
Jarre embraced the fact that, in the 1880s, Americans were in love with the
vibrant, clashing colours produced by new aniline dyes: purple, turquoise,
magenta, crimson… In the tough mining town of Tombstone,
Arizona,
people had an insatiable appetite for novelty and colour, and they were willing
to pay for it.

Tombstone
is surely one of the best-dressed Westerns ever made. The lawmen and gamblers
dress as 1880’s men-about town, wearing silk-cravats, bowler-hats and immaculately
starched collars. History may know them as ‘Wild West gunfighters’, but Porro’s
designs acknowledge that the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday saw themselves as modern
businessmen, not thugs. Through dress, they identify themselves as the bearers
of progress, urbanisation, capitalism and order.

Scene from Tombstone (1993), director: George P. Cosmatos

By contrast, the
outlaw cowboys dress in garish, eccentric costumes, their rustic styles marking
them as reactionary and antisocial. Sharp tailoring and personal hygiene must
triumph over chaos. This is more profound than it seems, as recent research
suggests the ‘gunfight at the OK Corral’ was not ‘good vs. evil’, but modern capitalism
using police to conquer the frontier by force. In Tombstone,
the white guys in suits always win.

How important is historical accuracy in costume? In this film, the outlaw
cowboys wear red sashes to give the impression that they were a modern criminal
gang. In fact, the ‘Cow-boys’ operating in Arizona were merely a loose, shifting population
of cattle-rustlers, bandits, and small-time ranchers, and they did not wear
‘gang colours’. However, these historically-inaccurate sashes allow the film to
engage with 1990’s anxieties about policing modern urban gangs, just as the Earp/Holliday
movies of the 1940s, 50s and 70s reflected America’s
anxieties about Hiroshima, the Cold War, or Vietnam
respectively. These movies have always raised questions about the legitimacy –
and the essential Americanness – of using violence to enforce order: the
historically-inaccurate ‘gang colours’ in Tombstone draw
audiences back to those historically-authentic questions.

Forced by necessity to make everything afresh, Tombstone’s costume designers subverted the expectations of 1990’s
audiences by reminding them that people in the ‘Olden Days’ did not see themselves
as the quaint, dowdy figures fossilised in sepia photographs. Rather, they were
sophisticated, stylish, excited by new technology and fashion, and grappling
self-consciously with the pressures of modernity.

Sources:

‘Awful Arizona’,
Denver Republican, May 22, 1882

Michael F. Blake, Hollywood and the OK Corral: Portrayals of the Gunfight and Wyatt Earp
(Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2007) [most of this textile story is drawn from Blake’s interviews
with people who worked on Tombstone)

Gary Roberts, Doc Holliday: the Life and Legend (Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley and Sons, 2006)